How to change your appearance in Dragon’s Dogma 2

You’ll create your character and determine their appearance first thing in Dragon’s Dogma 2. How you and your main pawn look — their race, overall body shape and weight, age, and gender presentation — is pretty much locked in from then on. But there are a couple (expensive) ways to change how you and your pawn look.

Our Dragon’s Dogma 2 guide will explain how to change your appearance after character creation and the limitations of doing so.

Visit a barbarie for a haircut

Image: Capcom via Polygon

In the capital city of Vernworth, you’ll find a shop on the west side called Clovis’s Barberie — it’s even got a barber pole-style sign out front, and is indicated on the map by a scissors icon.

At the barberie, you can change your hairstyle (and facial hair), makeup, and markings (tattoos and scars) for 10,000 gold each. There’s also a bundle for 25,000 gold that lets you change all three.

You’ll also see an option to modify appearance, but it’s grayed out. That’s because you’ll need a special item for that.

Buy an ‘Art of Metamorphosis’ tome

Image: Capcom via Polygon

At the Pawn Guild in Vernworth, the attendant has a shop where you can buy incenses to change your main pawn’s inclination and voice. They also sell a book called the “Art of Metamorphosis” for 500 Rift Crystals (RC), though stock is limited to two total. (As of this writing, we haven’t found an addition location that sells the tome or figured out how it comes back in stock, but will update this guide when we do.)

You’ll earn RC by finding them in chests, restoring forgotten riftstones, and as rewards when you set pawn quests for your main pawn.

If you buy one you can change either your Arisen’s or your main pawn’s appearance — you’ll need to buy both books to change both appearances. To do so, take your “Art(s) of Metamorphosis” to the barberie, and the modify appearance option will be available.

Using it lets you jump back into the character creator, but not exactly from scratch. You cannot change between human and beastren. That’s the only limitation, though. Everything else is available to tweak — you can start with an entirely new appearance or switch gender presentation. You can even use this to increase your overall body weight and size to increase your inventory size.

That price of 500 RC is a bit steep early on in the game, and the limited inventory means you're not going to want to (or even be able to) change your appearance on a whim.

For more Dragon’s Dogma 2 guides, check out our beginners guides to combat and the pawn system, or peruse our list of all vocations. We also have explainers on how to change time of day, how to increase your inventory size, how to get out of gaol, and how to change vocations.